WORLD REVIEW
 |
| In an Internet first, the US gospel-pop group the Oak Ridge Boys auctioned off a New Year’s Eve performance in the location of your choice for $25,000 or more. One credit card company even offered no payment until next year. |
For the second time in three weeks, Google got good reviews by doing what Microsoft has been doing for years - copying other people's ideas but making them better; and uncannily, just like Google had the intuition to know the world needed another browser, it realised that there are not nearly enough mobile phones, so it made another one; this time it's an Android phone and immediately a lot of people were awe-struck at how much better it was than that old last-month's Apple iPhone, not to mention the Android is cheaper and has the biggest little keypad, and thus can do actual Internet stuff, not just looking at things; a lot of other people were amazed that anyone could be so stupid as to think that anything in the whole world is better than an iPhone; seriously, though, a lot of otherwise sane people wrote analysis stating that, basically, Steve "President for Life" Jobs had got the whole Apple business model wrong with this proprietary stuff, and Google was sure to run him out of town with open source; sure they will.
T-Mobile of Germany, which owns T-Mobile of America (Android phone available) announced it will allow Germans and selected UK residents to give them quite a bit of money to use a Google Android phone after New Year's Eve, but before next March.
Fully authorised owners of Google Android phones (not you; you are far too foreign) can buy music from the Amazon.com MP3 store; that's big, because unlike Apple iTunes, you can take those songs and put them anywhere you want, as often as you want; take that, iTunes. Rupert Murdoch opened MySpace Music, which will shortly run Apple's iTunes out of business; well, that's the idea; MySpace Music comes from Amazon.com, and thus has no digital rights management, i.e. copy protection. Sony Ericsson announced that it will launch PlayNow Plus Real Soon Now; the store will sell to mobile phone owners, like Nokia's Comes with Music, but with more songs.
Universal Music Group announced it will launch a store for music videos and (who knows?) perhaps other video productions; it's a fight-back, in the sense that the music industry is starting to get impatient about only getting to skim music-sales profits instead of generate them. Because of suits from Universal and similar services, Muxtape went off the air; it created online playlists, and won heavy takedown-type demands from the music industry.
Previews of Microsoft Windows 7 indicate it will not ship with programs for email, movie making or photo editing; presumably, you can download them.
 |
| Amazon.com opened a new video service with many of the top US TV shows, free to stream on personal computers—so long as your PC is sitting in the US at the time. People in Thailand are far too foreign for the service. |
CEO Jerry Yang of Yahoo! introduced the Bain of their (maybe short) existence to his (for now) employees; he hired management consultants Bain & Co to tell him how to do things, and you may recognise this memo as the one that went around your company, maybe in 1997, maybe recently; Bain will "make process and structural changes," so Yahoo! can "get fit as an organisation," and "be more agile in a competitive marketplace;" English translation: Don't have magazine subscriptions sent to your work address. Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang really rubbed it in, inviting newspapers to cover the New York roll-out of its new advertising management platform called (yes) APT; what it is, is a system to streamline online advertising at newspaper web sites, which Yahoo! is trying to take away from the print media, mostly successfully; the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose' Mercury News of California bought into the Yahoo! system, which competes with Google and, increasingly, Microsoft.
"Hey, I've got an idea"; well if you really do, send it to Google, and they will send you $10 million by return; the only stipulation is that your idea has to fit into one of seven politically correct categories (sustainable energy, education, communities, etc.) and better than all the other good ideas; details at http://www.project10tothe100.com.
Microsoft joined Cray in a project to produce the world's cheapest supercomputer, ever - $25,000 for a CX1 compact that runs Windows HPC Server to boot; you can get it at Amazon and use a credit card, although not quite yet; that's about 860,000 baht in real money. Microsoft joined the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), also known as the Anyone-But-Apple group dedicated to producing "buy once, play anywhere" entertainment; of course the actual aim is to produce protection against pirates, and that is expected fairly soon.
They said that if the communists took over Hong Kong people would be arrested for posting messages warning about bank solvency; police said they arrested the 34-year-old man after panicked customers staged a run on the Bank of East Asia, because he posted an Internet forum message that he thought the bank was going to go bankrupt; although he sent the message after the run, authorities claim he had a criminal or dishonest intent and needs to be imprisoned.
Godzilla lives! Internet trackers Akamai say 30 per cent of all online attacks in the second quarter of this year originated in Japan, with the US and China humbly following in order.
Prev
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Next
